


Entanglement

by Ballades



Series: Bell's Theorem [1]
Category: Original Work
Genre: F/F, Science Fiction
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-13
Updated: 2016-03-13
Packaged: 2018-05-26 10:03:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,061
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6234328
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ballades/pseuds/Ballades
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jen; Emily; two people in a long-term relationship learn how to deal when their entangled lives fall apart again and again.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Entanglement

**Author's Note:**

> This is an offering to my subscribers. Thank you all for being here. Interpret the ending however you will.

Emily’s body is a mausoleum.

Mausoleum, definition.  1: a large tomb; especially :  a usually stone building with places for entombment of the dead above ground ("Mausoleum." Merriam-Webster.com. Merriam-Webster, n.d. Web.)(Jen always cites her sources).

The definition doesn’t fit precisely.  It isn’t accurate.  Jen knows it would annoy Emily if she said it out loud.  Emily had always been about the precise and the accurate, if science could be called either.  That was - is - one of her greatest faults.  Some people, Jen thinks, can only see the trees and not the forest.  Emily sees the fucking _stomates._  It’s a sinister product of her personal tendencies and the way she was raised.  It’s a trait guaranteed to start and end arguments.  The one good thing about loving a scientist: they can admit when they’re wrong, based on the evidence.

So as close as Jen can get, Emily’s body is a mausoleum.  A body preserved with the durability and longevity of marble, the mind inside rotting away, unaware it is already dead.  Emily sits slumped in her wheelchair with her head canted to the right, her hands lying palms up in her lap.  Her features are slack, dark eyes unfocused and lost under the sadness which surrounds her.  She sits directly below a cone of merciless daylight fluorescent, a harshly illuminated sculpture draped in formless robes.  Emily is a pietà holding the phantom remains of a life long ago ascended and gone.

“Oh, Ms. Chiu!  I didn’t realize you were here.  You’re early today.”

Jen summons up a polite smile, drags the crescent of it up her face, settling it for the split second deemed socially acceptable before letting the ends snap back down.  It falls away faster than terminal velocity.  Nine-point-eight meters per second squared, Emily would say, except Jen is probably wrong and Emily would correct her, and Jen in times past would have just sighed and thrown something.

“Brenda,” Jen says with a warmness she does not feel.  Not today.  She’s too tired, and this day is blurring into all the rest.  “Hi.  How are you?”  

Asking is expected, the socially acceptable thing to do.  Jen’s tired of that as well.  Tired of the visits, tired of the dejà-vu, tired of pretending, tired of this routine full of useless questions and the tiny ripples of care others extend her way.

“Magnitude three,” Jen can almost hear Emily say.  “Care-quake barely felt.”  Of course Emily would throw seismology in as well.  Jen’s care-quake had broken the Richter scale.  The aftershocks have since diminished in the five years Emily has been here.

Here: the care facility, a nursing home, an extended hospice, a relic from generations ago.  It’s one of the very few remaining.  In a world that has practically conquered aging and disease Emily is an anomaly, an outlier.  But Jen knows there will always be outliers.  She’s got enough statistics to expect plot points whizzing away from the rest like some crazy young retrograde star whirling out of its nebula.

Emily would throw herself out of the data set if not for Jen, but Jen’s got a soft spot for those who stand apart.  She’s the one who found the home, assured Emily during her periods of lucidity that everything would be - well, not fine, but okay.  Acceptable.  Better than baseline, but not optimal.  It wasn’t as if Emily had a choice, anyway.

“Did you want to take her outside?” Brenda asks.  “Some fresh air would be good.  She’s been in here most of the day.”  Jen glances away from Emily long enough to acknowledge the room with its solarblocking windows, the low-pile carpet so variegated in color it looks oil-slick gray.  Faceless patients dot the open waters of it like flotsam.

“Sure,” Jen agrees.  Anything to get out of the room.  Anything to escape the smell of hand sanitizer and the odors of sterility and preservation.

Jen steps behind Emily’s wheelchair, grasps the handles.  They feel oddly real, every bump of the grips hard and clear against the skin of her fingers.  She pushes Emily towards the courtyard door, glances reflexively out the windows as she passes.  There is a cemetery across the street, and a funeral parlor next door.  A colossal joke, Jen thinks.  The care facility will never provide either of those places with steady business.  The scythe is always near in places like these, taunting, but unable to finish sweeping away lives.  No one ever dies here.

No, Jen thinks, they simply cease functioning until only the minute rise and fall of breathing differentiates them from carved stone.

The automated door opens slowly as they approach.  Jen breathes in fresh air aggressively as they exit the building.  She hates this place so much.  She hates that she’s the one who’s done this.

“Em,” Jen says, parking her in a streak of sunlight.  Jen locks the chair in place.  “Look.  Such a nice day, right?”

Emily responds with a slow blink, eyes rolling slightly, her pupils black pinpricks.  Jen puts her face in her hand and inhales through her nose.

The graveyard hovers nearby, inviting its monuments home.

* * *

It shouldn’t have ever happened.  Emily had been through enough.  She was a survivor, a pioneer, part of a crop of first adopters - test subjects, really - of a new kind of transplant.  It had been designed to help those who could not use their bodies but had the full faculties of their minds.  Those who were locked in.

That had been Emily.

She had been the hope of the Gao family, a powerful and tightly-knit clan best known for first investing in and then driving the quantum mechanics industry.  Their rather unimaginatively-named company, Gao Industries, had in the last several generations produced wondrous pieces of technology that quietly revolutionized various sectors.  First, piggybacking upon the then-new and wildly-panned quantum computing particles, Gao Industries had produced quantum synapses, and from there quantum dendrites and quantum this and that until a sizable chunk of the neurostructure industry was theirs.  

Jen had about as much understanding of this history as any other average human; again, she wasn’t a scientist, and neither was she a doctor.  The Gao family was notoriously private, and as Jen found out later, incredibly strict, holding its children to superhuman standards.  No relative of Emily’s was allowed to be mediocre.  Jen wouldn’t have blamed Emily in the slightest for cracking under the pressure.

Instead Emily had obliterated the expectations, rocketing to a level of stratospheric genius that made her already-brilliant siblings seem average by comparison.  For example - and Jen loved this particular example because it had nothing to do with science or math - Emily began reading and writing at three in both English and Mandarin, and added native fluency in Cantonese, Japanese, Hokkien, Tamil, and Malay by the time she hit double digits.

“Cheater,” Jen had said one time at the pool, sitting side by side with her, their legs moving idly in the warmed water.  “You grew up in Singapore.”

Emily had given her a megawatt grin, the one her family glimpsed as rarely as a comet, and fired off a snarky remark in what Jen assumed was German.  It certainly didn’t sound like French.  The Gaos, of course, had a long-term residence in Geneva.

That had been Emily before the freak car accident destroyed her body.  That had also been Emily afterwards, still scorchingly smart after her consciousness transplant to a state-of-the-art  vat-printed body.  She hadn’t lost a step at all it seemed, bounding through her rehab and graduating from her sessions as early as she had done in all her other schooling.  She was the success story, the poster child for consciousness digitization, her every personality trait mapped perfectly from her old brain to her new.  Thanks to her, hybridized brains made the headlines everywhere.  She was a miracle of modern science.

Emily took her increased fame as well in stride as she could, but between the interviews and the constant harassment, wound up confining herself to their house and her laboratory.  “It’s not so bad,” she told Jen.  “I’ve got you.  That’s all I want.  I even have an excuse to avoid my family.  We can be normal like this.”

“Em,” Jen said, “you wouldn’t know normal if it bit you on the ass.”

Emily sighed in agreement, then smiled.  “But you would.  You’ll have to teach me.”

“How to recognize a bite on the ass, or how to be normal?”  Jen grinned.  “The first I can do, but the second?  You’re exceptional, and always will be.”

“At least,” Emily said, her voice softening.  “At least let me try, okay?  With you.”

They did until Emily’s exceptionalism came back, and her brain began to deteriorate.

* * *

“Oh, Ms. Chiu!  I didn’t realize you were here.  You’re early today.”

Jen blinks, the scene settling into itself before her eyes like puzzle pieces.  Here she is in the care facility again; there are the other patients, still faceless, still on the same islands on the gray ocean of the carpet, or so Jen thinks.  It occurs to her how strange it is she’s never asked about their names.  That isn’t like her at all.  She’s the historian, the storyteller, the one whose compulsive need to know all the possible angles led her into the stacks of history and myth.  Jen spends her days figuring out the truth, separating fact from fiction, corroborating accounts.  She is well aware how unreliable a single narrator can be.

“Brenda,” Jen says with a warmness she does not feel.  Then she blinks and looks at the aide again.  “Have you done something different to yourself?”

“Not really,” Brenda responds chirpily, a smile stretching catlike over pointed features and sepia skin.  “Maybe it’s my hair?  I parted it on the other side today.”

Jen frowns, nonplussed.  The change is more significant than that.  “No,” Jen says, “I remember you had - “

Something flickers, and Jen’s vision fuzzes like one of those old analog televisions dropping its signal.  A pain greater than herself spikes through every nerve, a hundred thousand molten needles pricking her from head to toe.  “Not enough,” Emily would say.  “The human body has closer to a hundred billion nerve cells.”

Jen’s scream freezes in her throat as her entire body tenses, reacting to a hundred billion lilliputian stabs.  She has not experienced pain on an order of magnitude like this, a pain so large and looming she has no choice but to be swallowed by it.  Blinded, Jen sucks down a breath, hears faintly someone shouting _oh God no, oh God -_

And then she’s strong on her own two feet again, the pain not even a memory, like it hasn’t happened.  Brenda is chatting to her.  “And I thought, you know, maybe we should try this -“

Jen interrupts her.  “Have you done something different to yourself?”

Brenda pauses mid-sentence, mouth hanging open.  She purses her lips, then takes a breath.  “I’m sorry?”

It’s really bothering her.  “Have you done something different to yourself?”

“Not really,” Brenda says a little curtly.  “Were you listening to me just now?”

“I’m sorry, I was distracted,” Jen responds in kind, rankled at Brenda’s tone.  “Would you mind repeating for me?”

“Not at all,” Brenda says in a way that implies she does mind quite a bit.  “I had an idea to try a technique from the early twenty-first century today.”  As if by magic a pair of headphones appears, and Brenda holds them up to show Jen.  Why Brenda wants to use such antiquated technology eludes Jen, but she accepts it without a word.  Likely something to do with the archaic technique.  Perhaps whatever is being listened to can’t be transmitted to the imPlant, which is standard cochlear tech nowadays.

“It was developed to help those with dementia,” Brenda begins explaining.

Jen’s voice is flat.  “Emily doesn’t have dementia.”

“It was developed to help those with dementia,” Brenda says again, slower, enunciating.  “I thought I’d give it a shot with Dr. Gao.”

“And?”

At this, Brenda fairly beams.  “You should see for yourself,” she whispers, pulling out an iPod Shuffle - where has she gotten that, it’s as ancient as the headphones - and hooking it onto the neckline of Emily’s robe.  She maneuvers the headphones over Emily’s ears.

“I put on your wedding music.  Your first dance.”  Brenda’s thumb brushes the center of the device, the fleshy pad of the finger flattening slightly when she depresses the button.

“How did you know -“ Jen starts to ask, but Emily’s eyelids flutter once, twice, her chest rising in a deep inhale.  Emily straightens millimeter by millimeter in her chair, a time lapse of Jen’s shock.  When she is finally upright she looks straight into Jen’s eyes, her own as unclouded and clear as the day they got married.

“Jen?” Emily says, and Jen falls to her knees, stunned and nauseous, like she’s been punched repeatedly in the stomach.  “Jen.  The mist.”

Jen puts a hand to her mouth and tries not to throw up.  Of course Emily would talk about work first thing.

* * *

“Jen?  Jen.  The mist.”

“Yeah.  Sorry, I’m listening.”  Jen set down her fork and pushed away her thoughts.  “All right, you’ve got me.  Quantum mist.”

Emily took another bite of food before wiping her mouth delicately and placing the linen napkin on the table.  “Okay,” she said after she swallowed, “how much of the mist stuff do you remember?”

Jen pursed her lips, spent a moment digging down past the first few layers of her working memory.  “Last time we talked about this, you said you’d worked out the reassembly issues.”

“Yes,” Emily said, “no more instant mashed potatoes, though that’s an off-label use that would… Anyway, yes.  We’ve since managed to reassemble inanimate objects successfully.”

“So you put the mist in each chamber, zap the thing in one of them with science and numbers, and out it comes exactly the same?”  A huge breakthrough, if Emily and her team had managed it.

“Yes!” Emily affirmed, her eyes shining.  “Out it comes in the corresponding chamber exactly the same way it went in.  Entanglement.  Through carefully calibrated plasma stimulation we link the quantum states of each atom in the subject and - “

Jen laughed loudly.  “Science and numbers, Em!  Science and numbers.  And passive voice, God help the scientists.  Might as well be magic.”  She took a sip of her water.  “No presentations at the dinner table, please.”

“All right, fine,” Emily replied, a hint of patronization creeping into her voice.  “But yes.  We were able to teleport inanimate objects.”

“My God, Em, you didn’t tell me.”

“I did just now!”

“When it happened, I mean.”  Jen stared meaningfully across the table at Emily.

Emily rubbed her cheek and made a face.  “I thought I did.  It’s incredibly significant.  The probability of me not telling you…”

The stare increased intensity by several degrees until it hit a level reserved for spouses.  Jen leaned forward, placing her chin deliberately in the cradle of her palm, and narrowed her eyes comically until Emily giggled.  “So.”  Each movement of Jen’s jaw sent a stab of pressure down the long bones of her forearm.  “You had a breakthrough.  A bigger one than teleporting things.”

Emily folded her lips in then grinned, leaning forward conspiratorially, mirroring Jen.  “We teleported a rat.”

“What.”  Jen was so surprised she couldn’t even give the word inflection.

“We teleported a living creature.  A living creature!”  Emily balled her hands into fists with so much enthusiasm that they shook.  “We teleported a rat!  Not just one rat, but several rats.  We’ve already done it with bacteria and other micro-organisms but a rat!”

“Holy shit, Em.  Holy fucking shit.”  Jen’s words filtered through her fingers, sounding hollow.  “Are the rats okay?  You aren’t sitting on a colony’s worth of rat carpaccio, are you?”

Emily snorted her laughter, then clamped a hand over her mouth.  It was reflex, Jen knew, one of the many habits remaining from growing up in the regimented environment of Chez Gao.  Jen had been patiently working them out since she rescued the fair maiden from her emotional confinement.

“Oh my God.”  Emily’s hand fell away into her lap.  “Naturally you think of the rats first.  They’re fine.  They’re totally fine.  They’ve gone through multiple times without trouble.”

Jen pointed at her in challenge.  “Bet you didn’t put the Rat King in.”

“I did.”

“Liar!  Foul, vile untruths.”

“I did,” Emily repeated, grinning, “and then I put Cao Cao, Liu Bei, and Zhuge Liang in too.  See, Jen?  I do remember your stories.”

“This wasn’t how I meant for you to apply them,” Jen said dryly.  “You put them in all at once?”

“No!  Then I’d definitely have rat carpaccio.”

Jen threw herself backwards in her dining chair, propelled by the gust of her exhale.  “Have you said anything to your family?”

“Not yet.”  Emily glanced away.  “I want to test the mist more.  It seems too good to be true, sometimes.  Nothing is a hundred percent.  My family would want me to push for a goal before I found out the failure rate.”

“They don’t have enough money or fame, do they?”

A wan smile.  “They don’t have enough scruples, is what.  I report this, next thing you know we’ll be running human experiments.”

“They’d already have something huge with the inanimate object teleportation,” Jen protested.  “Wouldn’t that be enough?”

Emily took her fork and stabbed the remaining piece of meat, holding it up to observe it.  She turned it this way and that as if roasting it under her gaze.  

“Never.”

* * *

 

Another day, another visit.  She’s early.  There’s Brenda, different yet again.  If Jen stares long enough at the carpet it breaks into shallow waves, shifting before her eyes.  Monoliths jut up from its surface like breakers in the surf.  There is a meditation track of seashore sounds playing over the speakers.  Inexplicably, there are headphones in her hands.  The iPod is already clipped to Emily’s robe.  Everything smells like alcohol sanitizer.  A hearse goes by outside.

“Have you considered taking some time for yourself?” Brenda asks, concerned.

“I don’t understand.”  Jen’s eyes dart to the side, taking the aide in.

“You’re here all the time for her.  It’s very sweet, and you’re dedicated.  But you haven’t skipped a single day.”

“What are you trying to say?” Jen asks, hackles rising.  “That I should give up on her?”

“Of course not,” Brenda says, placating.  “Just that you should take care of yourself.  Make a decision about whether she’s alive or dead to you.”

“What the fuck?” Jen says reflexively, offended.  “Who - what the hell is wrong with you?  Who are you to tell me what I should be deciding?  How dare you!”

“So you can move on.”  Jen literally wants to claw Brenda’s face off.  She can feel her nails sharpening.  “So you can have some direction.  The decision can’t wait much longer.”

Jen barely contains her fury.  “There isn’t a decision.  Get out.”

“You can’t wait,” Brenda says, walking backwards.  “Look at her.  You can’t wait.  Either you do another transplant or -”

Jen shuts Brenda out, and the woman disappears.  She stands with the headphones clutched in her fists, the loose parts of it rattling from how hard she’s shaking.  And she looks -  _looks_  - at Emily.

Emily, who even after years of being immobilized still has a fullness of figure that speaks of health.  Whose face remains unsunken, the subcutaneous fat not devoured mercilessly by a body doing the calculus of living.  Whose complexion calls to mind the burst of spring lying beneath a thin layer of melting snow.

Jen puts the headphones on Emily, trembling, and pushes play.

Emily stirs and opens her eyes, straightening in her chair, Galatea coming beautifully to life.  The first full breath she takes tints her pale cheeks the color of fresh carnations.  “Jen?” she says, and her voice is the way it always sounds in Jen’s head, and not hoarse and rough with disuse.

“Em?”  Jen goes to her knees in front of Emily’s chair, swallowing down her emotions.  “Em, I’m here.”

Emily reaches for her, cups her face tenderly with both hands.  “Jen, we’re going to try waking you up again.  Okay?  We’re going to try again.”

Jen’s eyebrows draw together.  “I don’t understand.”

“Voice record start,” Emily says, cool and impassive.  “Begin protocol QM-4284, trial seven.  Sixty percent sedation.”

“Em, what are you talking about?”  Jen rises to her feet, her fingers curling around Emily’s elbows.  “Work again?  Why?”

“Let it work,” Emily mutters, not breaking eye contact with Jen.  “Please God, let it work.”

“Let what work?” Jen demands.  There’s that flicker again, like lightning over the sea.

The ocean roars, a sudden tempest of waves.  Jen screams her pain, and the undertow coils around her feet, drags her down into the water.

* * *

Everything goes haywire.  Everything and anything hooked up to her that can make a sound does so within moments of the trial beginning, the machines shrieking their panic in dissonant alarms that scrape along Emily’s nerves.  “Take her down, take her down!” Emily shouts, clambering onto the bed over Jen’s body, her hands pillars on Jen’s shoulders, load-bearing.  “Stop the trial, take her back down!”

Jen fights Emily as if she is the anesthesia, the velcro restraints binding her wrists and legs crackling with her effort.  Emily has expected this, but between the explosion of brain activity and the adrenaline Jen is manically, unbelievably strong even after being under for three weeks.  Emily crouches over Jen, her jaw clenched, trying not to touch any of the tubes and wires that are keeping her alive.  “Down,” Emily prays, “down.  Sleep, sleep.”  The points of Jen’s EEG bounce frantically before straining to their maximum heights, plateaus upon plateaus.

Seconds tick by like beads on a rosary.  Jen’s eyes flick open and closed as if her body is a new house and she is testing all the hinges.  Emily hardly registers the anesthesiologist and her team working, can’t see them through the bitter haze of tears occluding her vision.  Emily blinks, the tears dripping down, shattering into pieces on Jen’s forehead and cheeks.

One by one the machines subside, returning placated to their posts now that their thresholds are no longer breached.  Emily gets down from the bed gingerly, then methodically checks Jen to make sure nothing is loose or dislocated.  “Dr. Gao,” the anesthesiologist says as Emily adjusts the ventilator tube, smoothing her thumb over the strap that keeps it firmly attached.  Not that it would deter a patient exiting anesthesia.  They strip themselves of their accessories the way toddlers strip themselves of clothing, hellbent on nudity.  “Dr. Gao,” she repeats.

Emily finally turns to face her.  “Yes?”

She shakes her head.  “I’m sorry, Dr. Gao.  At this point I have to conclude that she will most likely always experience debilitating pain as soon as she’s conscious.  Given our other trials and how long we ran them, it seems that she would be facing this constantly.  We can keep her deeply sedated for a while longer, but…”  At this, she reaches out and lays her hand on Emily’s arm.  “But you’ll need to come to a decision regarding her care.”

“I understand.  Thank you, Brenda.  I need a moment with her.”  Emily indicates the door.  

Brenda and her team disperse in single file like they’re already at Jen’s funeral.  In a way, they are.  Jen is barely alive, and Emily is well aware of how time is corroding what’s left of her.  If Jen could talk, she would take the opportunity to reference some myth.  “This is the longest journey down the river Styx ever,” she might complain.  “What’d you do, give Charon fake coins?  Wrong currency?  Conversion rate poor?  Now he’s pissed off at you and we’ll be on this boat for all eternity.”

Emily laughs despite herself, then wrestles back the sob that inevitably wants to follow.  She hadn’t given the heralds of death any tender except for Jen.  The cost had been counted the nanosecond the quantum mist dissolved her into her fundamental pieces.  Jen’s change came out screaming on the other side, and wouldn’t stop.  They had to tranq her.

They saw later what had happened.  Jen’s brain, upon reassembly, treated her whole body as if it were missing, firing off test spark after test spark.  But then it had stayed in that state of disbelief, stuck sending and receiving impulses until Brenda had ordered the capsizing of Jen’s consciousness, sinking it to a level just above a coma.

That had been three weeks and seven trials ago, each attempt at waking the same as before.  Emily takes a seat on the thickly cushioned club chair she’d placed in Jen’s room after the first week of nothing.  She’s spent lots of time in it, talking to Jen, asking her questions about what kind of decor she’d like to have.  Well, books of course, a ton of books.  Floor-to-ceiling shelves of books accompanied by a big picture window, high-pile rugs in jewel tones, and brightly-patterned handwoven throw blankets made of cashmere and silk and the finest cotton.  Emily had moved a roll-top desk in as well, furnished it with Jen’s favorite pens and pencils.

“Handwriting,” Jen used to say, and Emily would brace herself for a lecture, wait for Jen to begin pacing, impassioned.  “You know what kind of neurological benefit handwriting has, Em, it’s good for you!  We connect on an analog level so rarely nowadays.  I hand-write because it slows things down for me, lets me think.”

“You hand-write because it makes you feel morally superior,” Emily would reply.

“That too,” Jen would say, and they’d both snicker.

Emily rises halfway and drags the chair to Jen’s bedside.  “Hey,” she says as she takes Jen’s hand, pallid and skeletal in the artificial sunlight coming from the hologlass window.  “I know you can hear me.  I’m sorry about before.  I keep hoping the result will be different the next time.  Madness or stubbornness, you decide.  You’ve called me both.”

Emily sighs heavily enough to stir Jen’s hair, the limp locks starkly black against the white of her bedlinens.  “Brenda’s right, you know,” she murmurs eventually.  “You’ve been under for three weeks.  We can keep you in this state for maybe six months, if you don’t mind being a Halloween decoration when you wake up.  You’ll also have a raging addiction to the pain meds we’ve been giving you.  I’m sorry about that too.  I know you liked your new body.”

New body is a misnomer; Jen’s had it for sixteen years, close enough to half her life to count.  Barely.  Emily would shove it into the outside reaches of the standard deviation and call it a day.  “You’re probably thinking we could get you another new body,” Emily says.  “I mean, what’s another vatbody if you’ve already got one?  But you have to be awake and conscious for us to scan you for the transplant.”

A pause.  “The tech team still has your backup from the accident, but…how do you feel about dating an older woman, I wonder?”  Emily’s hand tightens on Jen’s, their wedding rings grinding together in her grip.  Jen’s is loose.  “You wouldn’t really know me, that’s the trouble.  But you’d be alive, and could be happy without me.  I’d like to say I’ve become better these last fifteen years thanks to you.  I don’t know how I’d feel to have you wake up and not even know we got married.  To not know our inside jokes.  To see me aged sixteen years older in a blink.”

“You still look young,” Emily can almost hear Jen saying, mollifying.

“Yeah, but I’ll look old soon enough.”  Emily brushes her cheek against the back of Jen’s palm.  “Older faster, if my family has its way.  I’ve told them what happened to you, but all they could hear was opportunity.  They want this, Em, they’re dying for it - “

“Give ‘em shit,” Jen cuts in helpfully, or would if she could.  

Emily snorts.  “That’s the plan.  To market this tech as safe is - I can’t let them do it.  You’re the only one who’s ended up this way so far.  The outlier.  Before you I’d have just done the risk analysis, you know?  Probability and all that.  I did the analysis for you.  I thought that the point-zero-zero… Sorry, you don’t do numbers.”  Emily presses her fingertips to her eyebrows.  “I didn’t think the bad luck would be yours.  But now it’s real.”  

The burden rests heavy on Emily’s shoulders.  She closes her eyes.  “It’s real.  And I’m so sorry.”

Emily’s imPlant chimes.  “Message from the Chiu family,” Siri says.  Emily prefers other AI voices, but Jen had been delighted at how Siri managed to live on after hundreds of years.  She’d switched it the day before the mist ate her, and Emily couldn’t bring herself to change it back afterwards.

“Archive,” Emily commands.  She can’t face them right now.

“I will archive it.  Message from your mother,” Siri continues.

“Archive.”

“I will archive it.  Message from That Asshole With DARPA.”

Emily groans.  “Archive!”

“I will archive it.  Message from the Gao Industries board of directors.”

“Archive - fucking archive it, Siri.”

“I will fucking archive it, Emily,” Siri deadpans.

“My God,” Emily mutters.  She picks up the thread of the conversation from where she’s dropped it.  “So these are our choices.  Restore you to someone I wouldn’t know and maybe lose you in the process, keep you in a holding pattern for another few months and torture you with every waking in order to satisfy my desperation, or let you go and destroy everything so that they can’t...”

Emily sobs finally, crumpling over the carved stillness of Jen’s form, emotion rising inexorably like high tide beneath a full moon.  “You were supposed to survive,” she cries.  “You already did it once.  You weren’t supposed to - once was enough.  God, why?  Why again?”

Then there is the silence of mourning, of held breaths, of the tightness in the chest when the body forgets how to regulate its breathing.

“Siri,” Emily says finally, her voice cracking.  She clears her throat and tries again.  “Siri.”

“Yes, Emily?”

Emily stands slowly.  “Call Brenda and tell her I’ve made my decision.”

“Calling Brenda.”

“Jen,” Emily whispers.  “I love you.”


End file.
